In the wake of the great hospitality shown by the OTN crew at Open World, Tim Hall thought that getting the community together for a series of “OTN appreciation” blogs would be a good way to show our thanks back. Thinking about tools provided by Oracle that make my life easier, my mind went to dbnodeupdate.sh. This tool helps… Read More »

I’ve been playing a bit lately with Oracle VM on a few different platforms (ODA, Exalytics, Private Cloud Appliance) and was tasked with creating a good Oracle VM template image for Oracle Linux 7. Oracle makes templates available on eDelivery (https://edelivery.oracle.com) that present you with VM configuration questions on first boot, but those VM templates have a… Read More »

I ran in to a small issue while applying the July 2016 quarterly patch to a couple of Exadata racks last week. The systems were running GI 12.1.0.2, previously with the January 2016 PSU. The patches applied successfully, and we were beginning the process of running the post-patch scripts on the databases in the cluster. This… Read More »

While preparing for a virtualized Exalytics upgrade, I was testing the various connection methods that would be needed. Last on the list was to validate that I could connect to the ILOM’s web interface, launch the java console, and mount an ISO file from my laptop to the machine. This is necessary because the… Read More »

By default on an Oracle RAC installation, the listeners are configured to allow any database to register with them. There is no security out of the box to determine which databases may register. While this makes it easy to create new databases without worrying about listener registration, this can cause potential problems in a real environment.… Read More »

I had the pleasure of rebuilding an Exadata rack for a customer a while back, and it provided a pretty good refresher in backup and recovery for me. As DBAs, we back up databases all the time, but the restores are performed much less frequently. In the case of this rack, there were several databases… Read More »

If you’ve run an exachk report, y0u may have seen the following message with regard to your databases: Status Type Message Status On Details FAIL Database Check Database parameter CLUSTER_INTERCONNECTS is NOT set to the recommended value db01:dbm011, db02:dbm012 View This check is commonly seen when a database is created on Exadata without using the custom… Read More »

There has recently been a lot of news about the exploit revealed in the bash shell. While the fix is very quick to implement, there are a couple of tricks that are required to install this update on an Exadata environment. According to Oracle support note #1405320.1, Exadata storage server versions 11.2.3.x.x and 12.1.1.x.x are susceptible… Read More »

The #enkitecworlddomination bus has a few new stops on the tour… Today was a pretty big day at Enkitec – one that probably comes as a shock to many people. In case you haven’t heard, Enkitec has been acquired by Accenture, which still sounds a little weird, to be honest. I’ve pretty much spent my entire career… Read More »

I noticed something for the first time tonight when I was playing around in the Enkitec lab – something that I have been doing wrong for a while. When working in the lab, I often rely on the crsctl command to shut down the entire cluster stack for me. It’s really easy to use “crsctl… Read More »